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The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.

The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors.

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.

It happened. Today, Google is up on stage at I/O unveiling a new WebM project alongside a slew of partners (notably: Mozilla and Opera on the browser side) that gets the On2 codec out into the open. This is huge news for the fight for Open Video, and everyone will now have eyes on Safari and IE. Microsoft posted a month back about their stance, probably to get it out before this announcement. If folks don’t support this….. it is weak.

YouTube will be a huge push here, and you can go to their html5 version: http://www.youtube.com/html5 and check it out. Today it is available in trunk builds on Chromium and Firefox. Soon, an Opera beta, Chrome dev release, and more.

The project is going after:

• Openness and innovation. A key factor in the web’s success is
  that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP are open
  for anyone to implement and improve. With video being core to the
  web experience, a high-quality, open video format choice is needed.
  WebM is 100% free, and open-sourced under a
  BSD-style license.

• Optimized for the web. Serving video on the web is different
  from traditional broadcast and offline mediums. Existing video
  formats were designed to serve the needs of these mediums and do
  it very well. WebM is focused on addressing the unique needs of
  serving video on the web.

  • Low computational footprint to enable playback on any device,
    including low-power netbooks, handhelds, tablets, etc.*

  • Simple container format

  • Highest quality real-time video delivery

  • Click and encode. Minimal codec profiles, sub-options; when
    possible, let the encoder make the tough choices.

* Note: The initial developer preview releases of browsers supporting WebM are not yet fully optimized and therefore have a higher computational footprint for screen rendering than we expect for the general releases. The computational efficiencies of WebM are more accurately measured today using the development tools in the VP8 SDKs. Optimizations of the browser implementations are forthcoming.

Congrats Open Web.

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As part of their on-going efforts to engage directly with the web developer community, Mozilla hosted a Web Caching Summit earlier this week to discuss how the web platform could better meet the needs of developers. In attendance were developers who work on Facebook, Google Search, Microsoft Office Live, Twitter, Yahoo, SproutCore, and Palm webOS. Arun Ranganathan moderated the gathering.

One of the core challenges identified by the group was that frequent visitors of a site are often missing resources in their browser cache that the site authors think should be there. In other words, why is the same user requesting a static cacheable image with a year-long expiration every few days?

A lively discussion ensued over 5 hours talking about this problem and others, touching on why this is the case and what page developers could do to maximize the cache-ablity of their websites.

A high-level summary of the outcome is:

- browsers should immediately investigate increasing the size of the browser cache
- Mozilla will learn more about caching behaviors in the browser, perhaps by using Test Pilot to collect more information from end users
- Mozilla will investigate means of prioritizing content in the cache, either by allowing developers to prioritize content (i.e., set some content on the page as a higher cache priority than others) or through implicitly prioritizing (e.g., CSS and JS above images).

What do you think browser vendors could do to improve caching?

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Michael Hanson and a team at Mozilla Labs have been doing some really interesting work with Identity in the browser (and taking ownership back from services).

They just released an alpha add-on for Firefox that begins to integrate contacts from services (right now: “Gmail, Twitter, and, on MacOS-based machines, the local Address Book” but growing).

Imagine getting auto-complete across all of your forms… like this:

Here is a list of features:

• A browser-based Contacts database that stays in sync with your address books (so far, it supports GMail, Twitter and Mac OS Address book)
• A generic importer system for Contacts from desktop or web-based address books (so you can implement missing ones)
• An email autocompletion feature, which demonstrates how the browser can auto-complete email addresses on any website. The autocompletion is performed entirely in the browser, without sharing the your list of contacts with the website.
• A Javascript API that websites can use to access the Contacts database, with explicit user permission and filtering

Download it here.

This is very cool and you should also note the open technology being used:

• We’re indebted to our friends and colleagues at Mozilla Messaging, who have been working on address book integration in Thunderbird for years, and have the exciting new Raindrop messaging application in experimental development now. We are working on integrating the Raindrop project with the Contacts API!
• The Portable Contacts initiative is an important effort to define a common data definition for contact data. We use the Portable Contacts definition internally for Contacts.
• The W3C Contacts initiative is defining an industry-standard, cross-platform API for access to contact data in the browser. The spec is new and evolving, and now is the time to experiment and provide feedback!

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David Anderson: “TraceMonkey has rocket boosters, so it runs really fast when the boosters are on, but the boosters can’t always be turned on.”

Opera’s new JIT compiler Carakan is doing well as we just posted. What is Mozilla doing with TraceMonkey? A lot.

Mozilla JägerMonkey adds method based JIT (of V8 and Nitro fame) to keep the boosters on.

We learn more from David Mandelin and David Anderson.

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Mozilla Labs has released the magical 1.0 version of Weave and the doors are now open for developers.

When I was a part of Mozilla Labs day to day, I always loved the vision and team behind Weave. I kept wanting the implementation to match the vision, but it is a tough problem and it takes time to bake. Well, it is getting there now.

Weave is special because it offers a series of back-end services (more than just sync) that are build with users (and their privacy) in mind, rather than business models. I have talked to a couple of entrepreneurs recently and thought that there ideas could be implemented nicely on top of Weave.

It is still early days, but I am jazzed to see the platform getting opened up. I am hoping to get clients for Safari, Chrome, and IE…. and look forward to a webOS client too :)

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